Page 5657 - Week 13 - Thursday, 18 November 2010
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I thought it was rather ironic as well that on the radio the other morning we heard the concerns of the Australian Hotels Association that a change at this late stage may lead to a further increase in the fees. Whether that turns out to be the case or whether that was the AHA simply making contributions to the radio debate is unclear but I do not think that we as the Assembly could pass a disallowance motion and ask the attorney to come back again in under a week, given that the deadline is so close. And I think that is a risk in passing the motion today. As I said, we have heard about the number of licensees who have already paid. Certainly, I have had a discussion with the minister about this and the indication was 66 as at the close of business on Tuesday. I suspect there have been more since then.
I guess the question is: what would happen to those ones? Would they receive discount cheques in the mail? Alternatively, would some be asked to pay more again if the fee structure was adjusted to meet the revenue targets? Would it be fair to say, “You have already paid your fees but now we are going to increase them”? I do not think we should be creating a situation where those licensees who have got in early and paid before the due date then find themselves in limbo or having to reorganise themselves. We simply do not think that supporting the disallowance would be a responsible way to act.
I am surprised, given Mrs Dunne’s views—and these are the views of the Liberal Party—that this disallowance was not moved last month when there was an opportunity to do so and there was perhaps a more realistic time frame to implement an alternative approach.
Turning to the amendments that I will be moving today, we believe our amendments offer a more sensible way forward because they provide small and medium-sized licensees with the review that they are calling for and allow the reforms to commence on 1 December, as the Assembly voted on and supported earlier this year. By requiring the attorney to report back to the Assembly by 1 October 2011, we give the government nine months to undertake a comprehensive review of the fees. We then give the Assembly a further two months, from 1 October to 1 December next, when the next annual liquor fees will be renewed.
Turning to the fee as set out in the current determination, the question we have asked ourselves is whether the fees are so far off the mark that the need for disallowance outweighs the uncertainty that a successful disallowance would create. And we have concluded this disallowance today is not justified because the Greens do support a risk-based approach to setting the fees. It can, when done well, send signals to encourage good venue behaviour and we agree with most of what is in the fees. That said, we believe the fees could have been done better. Certainly, the attorney has focused rather singularly or largely on closing hours as the sole determinant.
Certainly, if the Greens had been the ones that were drafting this fee determination, we would have done a number of things. We certainly would have announced the fees earlier. We would have taken more factors into account, such as compliance history. I think we would have also taken a more refined approach to the factors that are used, such as venue size and annual liquor purchase, and I will come back to those points in a moment.
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